Thank you to everyone sending congratulatory messages regarding the Eppendorf & Science Prize. A link to my essay is provided here:
Parental Control Over the Brain
This work is the result a major collaborative effort. Jiangwen Zhang at Harvard FAS Computing played a central role in the development of the informatics pipeline. While next generation sequencing data analysis is becoming more mainstream, there was absolutely nothing to help in early 2007 (beyond Eland and a few other aligners) when we started and Jiangwen’s work was essential to getting it up and running. David Haig at Harvard played a vital role in the development of the statistical analysis and data interpretation. Gary Schroth and Shujun Luo at Illumina kindly collaborated by sharing their early versions of an RNA-Seq protocol and by carrying out some pilot sequencing studies for us to determine if the approach would succeed (yes, the initiation of the study predated publication of RNA-Seq). Jim Butler worked on the qPCR analysis of Il18 heterozygous mice. The entire study was carried out under the guidance and mentorship of Catherine Dulac in her lab in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department at Harvard.
Also, thank you to the Jaenisch lab for sharing mice and the outstanding members of the Dulac lab for discussions and ideas.
The work was funded by the Klarman Family Foundation for Eating Disorders, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an award from Merck. I was funded by the Human Frontiers Science Program and the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research.
Thank you to the Canadian Press for highlighting the prize at home!